Cal State L.A.’s civil engineering major to compete in solving math problems

Young mathematicians from throughout the nation to converge at CSULA

Los Angeles, CA -- Cal State L.A.’s 15-year-old freshman Ethian Ting will participate in the 30th annual American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) on Thursday, March 15. Ting qualified for the AIME by scoring 100 or more out of a possible 150—approximately the top five percent—on the American Mathematics Contest 12 (AMC 12, 12th grade and below).

A civil engineering major, Ting is enrolled at CSULA through the University’s Early Entrance Program (EEP) under the auspices of the Honors College. EEP is a unique educational program that is specifically designed to permit highly-gifted youngsters to enroll in college as full-time students. Established at CSULA in 1982, the program allows qualified students, as young as 11 years of age, the opportunity to excel at the university level.

The AIME contest, to be held from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center on the CSULA campus, is a 15-question, three-hour examination in which each answer is an integer number from 0 to 999. The questions on the AIME cover high school mathematics, and are much more difficult than those on the AMC 10 and AMC 12. All problems on the AIME can be solved by pre-calculus methods. The use of calculators is not allowed.

This contest was established in 1973 as an intermediate step between the high school (AMC 10 and AMC 12) contests and the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad (USA(J)MO). The contest leads to the USA(J)MO, Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program (MOSP) and the selection of the USA team sent to the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the premier international high school level problem-solving contest. This year, the IMO will be held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, from July 8 to 16, 2012.

According to Professor Steven Dunbar, director of the American Mathematics Competitions, the AIME is one of a series of contests sponsored each year by The Mathematical Association of America.

The AMC, located at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, offers the only math competition series in the country leading to the USA(J)MO and the MOSP. From this group of students, the AMC sends the highly-competitive USA Team to the prestigious annual IMO. The contests are given across the U.S.A, Canada, and in many schools abroad.

Details concerning the 2012 AIME contests for high school, as well as the rest of AMC’s programs are available on the AMC web site: http://amc.maa.org.

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Working for California since 1947: The 175-acre hilltop campus of California State University, Los Angeles is at the heart of a major metropolitan city, just five miles from Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. More than 20,000 students and 220,000 alumni—with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds—reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. Six Colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs, among others, led by an award-winning faculty. Cal State L.A. is home to the critically-acclaimed Luckman Jazz Orchestra and to the Honors College for high-achieving students. Programs that provide exciting enrichment opportunities to students and community include an NEH-supported humanities center; a NASA-funded center for space research; and a growing forensic science program, housed in the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. www.calstatela.edu